1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology of data transmission in a network environment, and in particular to a system and method of mobile content sharing and delivery in an integrated network environment.
2. The Prior Arts
Nowadays, the progress and development of wireless communication technologies and mobile handheld devices (MHDs) have enabled users to get onto a specific network easily for accessing a plurality of information services through various mobile networks. From a different viewpoint, presently, quite a lot of MHDs are provided with simple digital camera functions, some of their high level versions are also capable of executing multi-media functions, such as audio recording/video recordings, etc. Therefore, an MHD can not only download various multi-media data from Internet, but the MHD itself is also capable of producing multi-media content; meanwhile, aided with the advance of data storage technology and an increase of its storage capacity, the library of multi-media content that can be stored on an MHD is getting increasingly enormous to an extent that it may serve as “a mobile information content provider device”. When this situation happens, it is natural that a user of an MHD in a user group may have the desire to exchange and share media content with a user of another MHD in the user group.
Refer to FIG. 1 for a system block diagram of a mobile content sharing and delivery system in an integrated network environment according to an embodiment of the present invention. As shown in FIG. 1, in practice, for a mobile handheld device, there usually exist two or three wireless communication means. For instance, presently, quite a lot of mobile phones are provided with communication modules of wireless LAN, telecommunication network, and Bluetooth. A mobile handheld device (MHD) can access different networks simultaneously, therefore, it is capable of performing different network services on different network interfaces (for example, performing handset communication functions on GSM/UMTS interface, and performing webpage access/multi-media sharing services on WiFi etc.), in case that the services scattered and distributed on various different networks can be combined further into an integrated network software that can be executed in a multi-network environment, such that this sort of integrated network environment is capable of providing a brand new, ubiquitous information services having great potential for further development.
To be more specific, supposing that two users A and B each having his mobile handheld device (MHD) respectively and stay in a same wireless network at the same time. In this case, user A has some information content stored in his MHD and would like to share them with user B. To achieve this purpose, the MHD of user A will firstly look up and find automatically the MHD of user B, then the MHD of user A will proceed with the communications, preparations, and initiations of data transfer with the MHD of user B. In case that during data transfer, user B has to leave to another place, but at this time, the data transfer has not been finished yet. At this moment, user A may utilize his MHD for communicating with his home server (possibly through mobile, wired, or wireless network, etc.) requesting his home server to allow user B to download some specific files, then user A will provide user B with a set of specific certificates for executing the file downloading process that has not been finished yet. Subsequently, after leaving his original network, the MHD of user B can still download the rest of the data files from user A's home server through other available networks, even though at this time, user A and user B are in different network domains.
Compared with a fixed network system, wireless network and mobile network have some different characteristics and shortcomings as follows:
Low transaction throughput: due to intrinsic restrictions, large volume information content transfer between MHDs requires a fairly long period of time.
Limited Power Capacity: while almost all the MHDs are battery-powered, in order to prevent too much and too fast power consumption, long distance data transmission should be avoided.
Limited Transmission Range: for single-hop transmission range, the range in a PAN or WLAN is restricted to a few or dozens meters. Therefore, during data transmission, the range of distance between two moving MHDs is rather restricted, such that they must remain in a same network domain in proceeding with data transfer.
Lack of Mobility Support: usually, a mobile network system can only support terminal mobility for location management. However, it is a great challenge for the current mobile network systems to provide data transfer services with cross network mobility support.
For the reasons mentioned above, it is evident that the functions and performances of mobile content sharing and delivery of wireless network and mobile network of the prior art are not quite satisfactory, thus it has much room for improvements.